EMC Picks Up BMC's Storage-Management Tool

It's rare that customers benefit when a vendor discontinues a product. But that may turn out to be the case for customers of BMC Software's storage resource management tool. BMC, which wants to focus on its core application performance and server-management products, on Wednesday announced plans to turn over its storage-management software to EMC Corp.

The two vendors have forged a sales, marketing, and technology partnership under which EMC buys the rights to BMC's Patrol Storage Manager product. In return, BMC will resell only EMC's ControlCenter suite of storage-management products to its customers. EMC will support existing customers of Patrol's product while the two work to integrate the Patrol Storage Management product into EMC's ControlCenter.

Storage resource management is at the heart of this agreement. The ability to intelligently manage storage resources lets business-technology managers save money by reducing the need to buy additional storage. It also can cut the amount of manual work by administrators by revealing how much capacity of a storage system is actually being used. In most enterprises, storage utilization levels are usually very low.

Every BMC customer will be offered an equivalent ControlCenter license, and BMC will remain involved in the development of the integrated product.

BMC wanted a vendor who could support the software and become a partner beyond that, says Peter Gerr, an analyst at Enterprise Storage Group. "BMC has picked the least threatening partner," he says. "IBM or HP could have threatened the vendor in the systems management space."